Brooklyn director Shaka King sets his debut film, 'Newlyweeds,' in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood he grew up in

Trae Harris, as Nina, and Amari Cheatom, as Lyle, in "Newlyweeds," about a couple in love with each other and with marijuana. It opens in New York Sept. 18 at Film Forum.

Look through the haze of the gentrified, hipster Brooklyn portrayed on TV and in movies, and you may be able to find some homegrown stories. One of them is "Newlyweeds," set in Bedford-Stuyvesant and directed by Shaka King, who was raised and still lives in the neighborhood he set his debut film in.

"White people who move to Brooklyn are such a focus of the contemporary media portrayal of Brooklyn," says the 33-year-old filmmaker . "I was not interested in encountering that. This is about my people here."

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The movie, which sprung from King's thesis project at NYU's Graduate Film Program, opens Wednesday at Film Forum. It follows a couple (Amari Cheatom, Trae Harris) in a blissed-out love triangle with cannabis.

King chose not to include recent additions to Bed-Stuy in his film. There are no Starbucks or high-rise condos. Instead, King shows the diverse Bed-Stuy he has known and loved all his life.

"There was a crackhouse on my block growing up, but there was also a doctor's office," King explains. "That's always been the beauty of Bed-Stuy. It's a working-class, middle-class, poor neighborhood — it's all of those things.

"With Mayor Bloomberg and [real estate developer] Bruce Ratner turning this city into a corporate playground, every street is just becoming more and more homogenous. It makes it kind of boring and bland."

To bring his film to life, King filmed "Newlyweeds" on the block he grew up on, as well as at his parents' current home.

"It really was a family affair," he says. "If you're going to make your first feature, you want all the love and support you can get."

He also enlisted current and former roommates to join his crew, including costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones and editor Kristan Sprague.

Taking his A-grade NYU thesis film to Sundance last January with such a close-knit Brooklyn team was a whole other kind of high, King says. Coming down was a challenge, not unlike the sobering challenges the characters in his film face.

"You build up these expectations in your mind, and then you get back home and you've spent all this money in Park City, Utah, and your phone is not quite ringing off the hook ," he says bluntly.

But now, he's looking forward to his film opening in his hometown, and has already turned his focus on another New York borough.

"I've got a TV show I'm developing about the Bronx in the '80s," King says. "It's related to all of the things about that era. ... We had the dawn of hip hop, the dawn of the crack epidemic, the dawn of street art in the form of graffiti. The city was going bankrupt, 40% of the Bronx was on fire.

"You had all of this amazing art and criminal activity happening in this dystopic universe."

The ideal home for the show, according to King, would be HBO. "I could curse and have as much violence as should be the case for that story because that was that world," he reasons. "I think any cable network would suffice."